Known and Strange Things Read online

  At dinner, in addition to Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul, there was a well-known American actor and his third wife. There were Vidia’s editor, our agent and his wife, our host, and three other young African writers. The host’s family claret was served with dinner, served after a proud announcement of its provenance, and poured almost ritualistically. Such things are bound to disappoint, but this one was outstanding. And, buoyed by it, we began to toast V. S. Naipaul, who sat bunched up in his chair, serene but a little tired, nodding repeatedly, saying, “Thank you, thank you,” with his characteristic bis, the repetition of language that was second nature to him. When three or four others had spoken, I gathered up my courage and said: “Vidia, I would like to join the others in celebrating your work”—though, in truth, the new book, called The Masque of Africa, ostensibly a study of African religion, was oddly narrow and stilted, not as good as his other voyages of inquiry, though still full of beautiful observation and language; but there is a time for literary criticism, and a time for toasts. I went on: “Your work, which has meant so much to an entire generation of postcolonial writers. I don’t agree with all your views, and in fact there are many of them I strongly disagree with”—I said “strongly” with what I hoped was a menacing tone—“but from you I have learned how to be productively disagreeable in my own views. I and others have learned, from you, that it is fine to be independent, that it is fine to go your own way and go against the crowd. You went your own way no matter what it cost you. Thank you for that.” I raised my glass, and everyone else raised theirs. A silence fell, and Vidia looked sober, almost chastened. But it was a soft look. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m very moved. I’m very moved.”

  This boat of which I am temporary captain is named the Roi des Belges. In 1890 Joseph Conrad piloted a steamship down the Congo on a boat with the same name. That journey became his inspiration for Heart of Darkness, a puzzling novella with nested narrators who unfold a shadowed, strangled, brutal tale. He wrote and published it in the last year of the nineteenth century. So, this perch on which I sit above the Thames—the sky is blue now, the 180-degree view of it full of long stratus clouds—this perch in which the city is exposed to me but I am not to it, is an homage to Conrad’s bitter vision. What might it mean when the native pilots the ship? What happens when the ones on the shore, numerous, unindividuated, are white?

  Heart of Darkness was written when rapacious extraction of African resources by European adventure was gospel truth—as it still is. The book helped create the questions that occupy us till this day. What does it mean to write about others? Who are these others? More pressingly, who are the articulate “we”? In Heart of Darkness, the natives—the niggers, as they are called in the book, the word falling each time like a lance—speak only twice, once to express enthusiasm for cannibalism, then, later, to bring the barely articulate report “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” Otherwise, these niggers, these savages, are little more than shadows and violence, either pressed into dumb service on the boat, or launching dumb, grieved, uncomprehending, and deadly attacks on it from the shore. Not only is this primitive, subhuman Africa incoherent to any African, it is incoherent to any right-thinking non-African, too. A hundred years ago, it was taken as the commonplace truth; it wasn’t outside the mainstream of European opinions about Africans. But we have all moved on. Those things are in the past, are they not?

  “For the first four days it rained.” Vidia’s face crinkled with pleasure. “You like that?” “I do, very much. It’s simple. It’s promising.” “I like it, too!” he said. What I had just quoted was the first line of The Enigma of Arrival, his intricate novel about life in rural England. I value Naipaul for his travel narratives, for his visits to the so-called dark places of the earth, the patient way he teases out complicated nonfictional stories from his various interlocutors in Iran, Indonesia, India, and elsewhere. I like India: A Million Mutinies Now, Among the Believers, and the long essay “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,” which, uncomfortable as they are in parts, also have the force of revelation. They are courageous not because they voice unpopular, and sometimes wrongheaded, opinion, but for the opposite reason: the books contain little opinion and are, rather, artful compressions of dozens of conversations. These are texts in which the natives, whoever they might be, speak for themselves and give an account, sometimes inadvertently, of their contradictory beliefs and ways of life, but also of their deep humanity. But it was The Enigma of Arrival, tirelessly intense, its intelligence fastened to the world of humans and of nature, that most influenced my own work, my own ear. I adore, still, its language, its inner music.

  For the first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was. Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field; and far away, depending on the light, glints of a little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land.

  In no small part, Vidia’s writing held my interest because he, too, after all, was one of the natives. He, too, was thought savage and, in his cruel term, half-made. He was a contradiction like no other.

  Dinner was over. We were in conversation, Vidia, our host, and me. He was in a good mood, flattered by the attention. Our host brought some rare books from her collection to show us. They were special editions of Mark Twain’s works, and on the flyleaf of each was an epigram written by Twain and, below each, his signature. The epigrams were typical Twain: ironic, dark. And so we leaned over the old volumes, and Vidia and I squinted and tried to make out the words from Twain’s elegant but occasionally illegible hand. We were sitting side by side, and Vidia, unsteady, had placed a hand on my knee for support, unselfconsciously. I read: “By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.” Laughter. “To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.” More laughter. Vidia began, “You know, these remind me very much of…” Ever the eager student, I blurted out, “La Rochefoucauld.” “Yes!” he said. “Yes! La Rochefoucauld.” And with wonder in his eyes, the weight from his hand and arm bearing down on me, he turned his head up to our host, who stood just behind, and said, “He’s very good. He speaks so well, he speaks well.” And, turning back to me, “You speak very well.” In any other context, it would have felt like faint praise, or even like an insult. But we’d drunk claret, we were laughing along to long-dead Twain, and I had managed to surprise the wily old master.

  Our host drifted away, and Vidia and I continued chatting about this and that. Swift judgments came down. The simplicity in Hemingway was “bogus” and nothing, Vidia said, like his own. Things Fall Apart was a fine book, but Achebe’s refusal to write about his decades in America was disappointing. Heart of Darkness was good, but structurally a failure. I asked him about the biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is, which he had authorized. He stiffened. That book, which was extraordinarily well written, was also shocking in the extent to which it revealed a nasty, petty, and insecure man. “One gives away so much in trust,” Vidia said. “One expects a certain discretion. It’s painful, it’s painful. But that’s quite all right. Others will be written. The record will be corrected.” He sounded like a boy being brave after gashing his thumb.

  The party was ending. It was time to leave. I said, “This was not what I expected.” “Oh?” he said, some new mischief in his eyes. “And what did you expect?” “I don’t know. Not this. I thought you’d be surly, and that I’d be rude.” He was pleased. “Very good, very good. So you must write about this. You must write it down, so that others know. That would be good for you, too.” The combination of ego, tenderness, and sly provocation was typical.

  Finally, after about twenty minutes, Nadira came for her husband. The hand, at long last, lifted itself from its resting place on my knee. This benevolent rheumy-eyed old soul: so fond of the word “nigger,” so aggressive in his lack of sympathy toward Africa, so brutal in his treatment of w
omen. He knew nothing about that. He knew only that he needed help standing up, needed help walking across the grand marble-floored foyer toward the private elevator.

  The city below. At certain heights, you get vertigo, but you also see what you otherwise might not.

  Housing Mr. Biswas

  A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, published in 1961, is one of the imperishable novels of the twentieth century. It is a novel of epic length, formal perfection, and two notable peculiarities: its setting, which, being domestic, is unusual for an epic; and its geographical location, Trinidad, an important island in the Caribbean but not a particularly influential one on the world stage. And yet, this severely delimited context gave Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul an entire world of experience and feeling on which to draw. The novel is episodic and packed with conflict, and Mr. Biswas, the hero, subverts heroic convention: he is smart and funny, but also often petulant, mean, and unsympathetic. His enemies, most of them his relatives, are largely unlikable, but they also have their admirable moments. The narrative is propelled by a clear goal—the acquisition of the titular house—which, it becomes apparent, can only be achieved by the most exhaustively circuitous route.

  From his birth until his untimely death forty-six years later, Mr. Biswas mostly lives in a series of houses that either do not belong to him or are houses unworthy of the name. Each of these houses is for Mr. Biswas an attempt at solving a problem, and each is a wrong answer in a different way. Mr. Biswas, like a figure out of myth—and indeed his birth is attended by negative portents and dour prophecies; he is declared to be “born in the wrong way”—seems doomed to live through each of these futile iterations before his destiny can be complete. The pointlessness and the wasted effort of these dead-end attempts give the novel a comic edge that links it both to picaresque and to the existentialist tradition. Futility is the way home. In the search, Mr. Biswas carries his meager possessions and his growing family along, from one unsuitable house to another, from Hanuman House to The Chase to Green Vale to Shorthills to a rental in Port of Spain. These residences are mere walls and roofs to Mr. Biswas. His tragedy is not only that none of them is a house for him, but that his awareness of the poor fit is acute and constant. Most of the houses belong to his despised in-laws, the Tulsis. A couple of them are built by Mr. Biswas himself, but these are swiftly undermined by their shoddiness and by elemental threat: one succumbs to flood, the other to fire. Even an expensive doll’s house he buys for his daughter Savi quickly ends up a splintered wreck. Brutal ironies dog Mr. Biswas every step of the way on life’s journey, the unfairness mounts intolerably; and yet it is a funny book, too, full of jagged capers, lively malice, clever talk.

  The novel opens with relief: Mr. Biswas has found his house. How terrible it would have been, he thinks, to have failed in this quest, “to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.” In the long search for this accommodation—the what and why having been answered in the prologue, the novel’s course is about the how—Mr. Biswas finds various lesser stratagems in which he can be temporarily housed. It begins with his name: not the “Mohun Biswas” inscribed belatedly on his birth certificate by a solicitor, but the “Mr. Biswas” by which we know him, right from the cradle. Mr. Biswas faces many humiliations but is rarely shorn of the modicum of dignity the honorific guarantees. The retention of this proper form of address is both comic and tense, particularly in the early sections of the novel:

  In the days that followed [his birth] Mr. Biswas was treated with attention and respect. His brothers and sisters were slapped if they disturbed his sleep, and the flexibility of his limbs was regarded as a matter of importance.

  A schoolboy, much less a babe in arms, is rarely singled out from his siblings and mates in this way. But the perpetual “Mr.” proves a shelter for Mr. Biswas. On the rare occasions at which someone calls him by his first name, there’s a slight shock to both Mr. Biswas and the reader, as though at a sudden solecism. For instance, at the office of the solicitor with his mother’s sister Tara:

  “Name of boy?”

  “Mohun,” Tara said.

  Mr. Biswas became shy. He passed his tongue above his upper lip and tried to make it touch the knobby tip of his nose.

  It is as though, even at a preschool age, Mr. Biswas knows that the “Mr.” is a precious possession of which he should not be casually deprived.

  —

  Literature is a second form of protection. Most important are Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, whom Mr. Biswas brandishes apotropaically. Were he to actually adopt their stoic precepts, his experience of life would be different. As it is, they serve him as defensive consolation, a carapace for his irredeemably querulous nature. Mr. Biswas himself nurtures the dream of literature. He writes, assembling the dream of writing from its basic building blocks, converting form into imagination. Schoolboy calligraphy becomes sign writing. Sign writing becomes journalism. Journalism edges toward something more lasting.

  And Mr. Biswas buys things, he acquires things, his wife Shama owns things of her own. Hemmed in by dissent and discord, given to complaint, Mr. Biswas marvels at “the endurance and uncomplainingness of inanimate objects”; and these many objects, which he houses, house him, too. Gradually, they increase in number and presence, and, at several points in the novel, the reader is given an updated inventory of what has been acquired and by what logic. These inventories, which may bring to mind the catalogue of ships in the Iliad or the many descriptions of rooms by Dickens, are markers of Mr. Biswas’s modest progress. Moving from The Chase, Mr. Biswas and Shama find that they cannot move out as they had moved in, with a donkey cart.

  These disregarded years had been years of acquisition….They had acquired a kitchen safe of white wood and netting. This too had been awkward to varnish and had been painted. One leg was shorter than the others and had to be propped up; now they knew without thinking that they must never lean on the safe or handle it with violence. They had acquired a hatrack, not because they possessed hats, but because it was a piece of furniture all but the very poor had. As a result, Mr. Biswas acquired a hat. And they had acquired, at Shama’s insistence, a dressingtable, the work of a craftsman, french-polished, with a large, clear mirror.

  Slowly, tentatively, with appalling setbacks, Mr. Biswas ceases to be one of the very poor. Later there’s a rockingchair, then a cherished Slumberking bed. (The adjective-noun compounds are a special feature of Mr. Biswas’s furnishings, as though to intensify the particularity of each item.) Then comes a delicate glass cabinet, which immediately loses one of its glass doors. The final time the family moves, to the house for Mr. Biswas on Sikkim Street in Port of Spain, the number of things has become impressive.

  The gatherings of a lifetime: the kitchen safe (encrusted with varnish, layer after layer of it, and paint of various colours, the wire-netting broken and clogged), the yellow kitchen table, the hatrack with the futile glass and broken hooks, the rockingchair, the fourposter (dismantled and unnoticeable), Shama’s dressingtable (standing against the cab, without its mirror, with all the drawers taken out, showing the unstained, unpolished wood inside, still, after all these years, so raw, so new), the bookcase and desk, Théophile’s bookcase, the Slumberking (a pink, intimate rose on the headrest), the glass cabinet (rescued from Mrs. Tulsi’s drawingroom), the destitute’s diningtable (on its back, its legs roped around, loaded with drawers and boxes), the typewriter (still a brilliant yellow, on which Mr. Biswas was going to write articles for the English and American Press, on which he had written his articles for the Ideal School, the letter to the doctor): the gatherings of a lifetime for so long scattered and even unnoticed, now all together on the tray of the lorry.

  These moments of inventory are among the most indelible passages in this masterwork of realism: one scarcely credits the idea that such meticulous and loving checklists could be invention. These things must have had these lives, and s
o they paradoxically underscore the veracity of Mr. Biswas’s own experiences. But the realism of the human interactions throughout the novel is similarly irresistible. Here they all are: Mr. Biswas; his mother, Bipti; his brothers and sister; his aunt Tara and her husband, Ajodha; his wife, Shama; his children (Savi, Anand, Myna, Kamla, appearing one by one, becoming real before our eyes, and being themselves actively drawn into the contest of life); his aggravating in-laws: Mrs. Tulsi, Seth, Padma, the indulged sons of the family (“the gods”), the absurdly numerous daughters, their husbands, their children; and the cascade of secondary and tertiary characters, the innominate crowd. All are convincingly themselves, and yet all are contained in the arc of the novel, brought in to play their parts in the story of Mr. Biswas’s life.

  Incident, fight, rancor, subterfuge: this is Mr. Biswas’s experience during the long years he lives with the Tulsis. His main foes are his mother-in-law, Mrs. Tulsi, and her brother-in-law Seth. They hold grudges against him, and he out-grudges them. He bickers, insults, mocks. His wife, Shama, no fool, plays both sides skillfully, siding with her husband sometimes, abandoning him at other times. Some of these battles of will Mr. Biswas wins, others he loses. Physical violence is commonplace: the frequent beatings the children in the extended household receive also spill over, rarely but astonishingly, into adult interaction. Pointless impasse is common. A House for Mr. Biswas hums along to the interweaving tunes of these several discords. But the book is also a patient, almost ecstatic, evocation of landscape and social life in Trinidad in the first half of the twentieth century. And if the human interactions are characterized by agony, the times and places—the farms, the roads, the villages, the thrumming energy of the city, the mornings, afternoons, dusks, nights—are described with profound and vigilant affection. Playing the angry and fast-moving currents of badinage against the dreamy swirl of memory, the novel’s flow is one of full-bore local savvy. One finally reads or rereads Mr. Biswas for this balanced totality, this fecund complexity, for the way it brings to startling fruition in twentieth-century Trinidad the promise of the nineteenth-century European novel.